This guy has some great stuff. This topic isn’t so much about marketing, he is commenting more on the nature of platforms that provide free, user-created content that are, in his opinion, going to create better quality products/offerings than “curated” (controlled) efforts made with a limited scope of people. So how does this apply to marketing?
Lay’s has recently been undergoing a campaign for users to submit a new flavour of chip, and in return snag a slice of profit and the prestige of saying they invented this-or-that new chip flavour. This is smart marketing for several reasons:
– It engages consumers
– It plants the idea in their head that there is a new chip flavour coming out suggested by an amateur, thus differentiating it and piquing interest
– It reminds consumers to buys Lay’s potato chips in an interesting way
This fits perfectly into Seth’s idea of “the previously unfound star get[ting] found”, where there will be many terrible chip flavour ideas, but also a few great ones the best taste experts at Lays may not have thought of. This is a new type of marketing only made possible in the last decade or two, and it reaches out to the audience while in return giving Lay’s a great idea at what it likely a cheap cost. It is, in a sense, democracy in marketing.
With the increasing ease of creating new products, I would not be surprised if our world is moving in a direction similar to what Seth describes, where the “stars”, whether they be products or people, get found much easier. This is good for consumers, because they get better products in an efficient way. It is also just plain cool.
Sources:
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2013/03/most-people-most-of-the-time-the-crowd-fallacy.html
Leave a Reply